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“If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh.” His eyes began to tear. “That's funny. I'm not even sad.” Then he went to urinate, and when he came back, he said, “You know, everybody is waiting for miracles to happen. But the whole human body is a goddamn miracle.” He recalled Otto Preminger telling him about his own response to taking LSD and then he mimicked Preminger's accent: “I saw tings, bot I did not zee myself.” Groucho was looking in a mirror on the dining room wall, and he said, “Well, I can see myself, but I still don't understand what the hell I'm doing here . . .”

A week later, Groucho told me that members of the Hog Farm commune who were extras in the movie had turned him on with marijuana on the set of Skidoo. “You know,” I said, “my mother once warned me that LSD would lead to pot.” “Well,” he said, “ your mother was right.”

When Skidoo was released, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, “I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He's much hipper than me.”

In 1971, during an interview with Flash magazine, Groucho said, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon's assassination.” Yet he wasn't subsequently arrested for threatening the life of a president. In view of the indictment against Black Panther David Hilliard for using similar

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